License to hate

By now, I'm sure all of you have heard about the 6-3 decision by the United States Supreme Court in favor of a Colorado web designer who felt like it was her right to refuse service to a gay couple on the basis of her "sincerely-held religious beliefs."

What you may not have heard is that upon looking into the details of the case, investigative reporters found that:

1. ... the man, named only as "Stewart" to protect his privacy, whom the plaintiff Lorie Smith said was one half of the gay couple who asked for her services, has never attempted to hire her, and in fact had never heard of her before the case became public;
2. ... he's a web designer himself, so in his own words, "It would make zero sense to hire a web designer when I can do that for myself;"
3. ... his gay fiancé, "Mike," doesn't exist;
4. ... and Stewart himself not only is not gay, he's been happily married to a woman for fifteen years.

So the upshot of it all is that Smith is so motivated by hatred of LGBTQ+ people that she invented an imaginary grievance, lied about it repeatedly through the various tiers of the court system, and eventually got license to deny service to a gay couple who doesn't, technically, exist.

The lawyers from the virulently anti-LGBTQ+ Alliance Defending Freedom, who defended Smith, don't seem at all upset by this.  After all, they got what they wanted; a court-sanctioned right to discriminate.  Kellie Fiedorek, who represented her, responded with a verbal shrug.

"No one should have to wait to be punished by the government to challenge an unjust law," Fiedorek said.

Apparently this allows you to invent a grievance, along with imaginary adversaries, and carry it to the highest levels of the judicial system.

And win.

Smith immediately took the mic on right-wing news to crow about this being a "victory for free speech and freedom of religion."  Because, of course, the explicit outcome was to allow her to get away with discriminating against a particular group she despises.  But what baffles me is how neither the six justices who sided with Smith, nor Fiedorek and the Alliance Defending Freedom, nor Smith herself, seem to realize how quickly this could be turned around.  What's to stop a queer-owned business from putting up a sign saying "No Straight People Allowed"?  Or an atheist-owned business refusing to serve Christians?  Or a liberal-owned business stating that no Republicans are allowed on the premises?

You have to wonder what the Religious Right will think if this decision starts being used against them.

Wasn't there already a battle over this sort of thing?  And didn't the bigots lose?  [Image of the February 1960 sit-in at Woolworth's, Durham, North Carolina is in the Public Domain]

Discrimination laws are there to prevent one individual's prejudice and hatred from impinging on the rights, security, safety, or life of someone based upon their demographics -- and especially, to protect members of oppressed or marginalized groups.  And before anyone comes at me about how oppressed and marginalized Christians are, allow me to point out that an overwhelming majority of Americans -- 63% -- self-identify as Christian.  In large swaths of the country, a non-Christian has a snowball's chance in hell of being elected to public office.  And in any case -- as I pointed out earlier -- Lorie Smith's grievance was completely spun from lies.  She created a bullseye herself, pasted it on her own forehead, and then claimed she'd been unfairly targeted.

And two-thirds of the Supreme Court agreed with her.

It's not just queer people who should be worried about this.  This ruling blows a gaping hole in prior protections from discrimination, not only on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation, but race and religion.  "The worry is that this provides a green light to any business owner that they can refuse service to any person on the basis of their identity, whether they’re gay or lesbian, or Jewish or Black, or anything, because they have an objection to those sorts of people being in their business,” said Katherine Franke, a professor at Columbia Law School.  "There was nothing in the opinion that limits it to objections to same-sex marriage."

The only thing that keeps me from despairing completely about this situation is the sense that this is the last gasp of dying ideological bigotry.  Younger people are overwhelmingly in support of full rights for LGBTQ people, including the right to marry, and against the bogus outrage of people like Lorie Smith and the Alliance Defending Freedom.  So inevitably, as the younger generation becomes an increasingly large percentage of voters, it is devoutly to be hoped that the pendulum will swing the other way and sweep away the ugly vestiges of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

In the interim, of course, a lot of damage can be done.  Queer people and our allies need to stand up and speak.  Shout, even.  Friday's decision was a travesty of justice, driven by a warped definition of freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and flies in the face of every piece of civil rights legislation back into the 1960s.

But now's not the time to give up, as tempting as it is.

We can't let the hatred and bigotry of the Lorie Smiths of the world win.

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Praying with captives

Maybe ten years ago I got in a protracted argument over the phone with a local man.  The subject was an online social media group he'd started, and which I initially had joined, that protested the privatization of nursing homes in our area.  The practice, the group description rightly said, has put appropriate health care for the elderly out of the reach of all but the wealthiest.

The call that evening was precipitated by the fact that I left the group.  Quietly -- I posted a quick note that the group was heading in a direction I wasn't comfortable with, and disconnected.  My reason for doing so was one member, who was (and is) stridently ultra-left, going so far as to ridicule and/or call evil anyone who didn't share his views.  The long screeds he posted were not only unpleasant, they were outside of the specific focus the group had been created to address, and as a result the group was devolving into a rant-filled political free-for-all.

The gentleman who started the group (I'll call him Steve) demanded to know what it was that I had disagreed with so vehemently that I felt the need to exit.  I was a well-known and well-respected figure, he said, a veteran teacher, and my leaving the group would be seen as a blow to its standing.

I told him that it wasn't about disagreement, it was about partisanship.  "I teach several classes which have political aspects," I said.  "If I'm seen as being publicly partisan, I will lose credibility with my students about being unbiased and open-minded."

"Don't you have opinions?" Steve shouted at me.

I sighed loudly enough that he heard me, and said, "Of course I have opinions.  But that's what they are: opinions.  I don't foist them off on my classes.  I present my students with facts, ideas, and critical thinking strategies, and let them come to their own conclusions."

"What if a kid asks you for your opinion on something like politics or religion?"

"I have one of two answers," I replied.  "If it's not germane to what we're discussing in class, I'll say so.  If it is, my usual response is, 'Why do you need to know my opinion?'  If the answer is simple curiosity, which it usually is, I just shake my head and tell them I'm not going there.  I steadfastly refuse to tell students what my religious views are and what political party I belong to.  Students are a captive audience.  It's way too easy for 'this is my opinion' to morph into 'and it should be yours, too.'"

By this time, Steve was so mad he was about to burst a blood vessel.  "But this isn't at school!  It's online!  You can't state your opinion to anyone?"

My own temper was fast rising, but I kept my voice level with an effort.  "I didn't say that.  What I'm saying is that I'm very careful.  Like it or not, I'm a public figure, and if I get involved in publicly-visible online partisan rants, it will damage my standing in the classroom."

He lost it.  "I can't believe someone as smart as you is just fine with private corporations taking over every fucking health care facility in the region!"

I snapped back, "I'm not fine with it.  I hate it.  For fuck's sake, my wife's a public health care nurse.  What the hell do you think my opinion is?"

That shut him up.  At least momentarily.

The bottom line, though, is that he never did get my point; students are required to be in school, so teachers have to be really cautious about how they use their position of power to maneuver students' opinions, even inadvertently.  Sometimes our beliefs can't help but be exposed; I never hesitated to confront racism, sexism, and homophobia in the classroom, for example.  But I always tried to be as careful as I could on most other topics.  Students look up to and trust teachers (well, most of them do most of the time), and if I used my authority to push my religious or political views, it would be a significant betrayal of that trust.

Which brings us to Monday's decision by the United States Supreme Court that a high school football coach praying with his athletes on the field was protected free speech.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The decision, unsurprisingly, was 6-3 along ideological lines.  In the majority opinion, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote, "We are aware of no historically-sound understanding of the Establishment Clause that begins to (make) it necessary for government to be hostile to religion in this way."

I'm no expert in law, but I do see that saying, "You can't pray with students at an event they're required to attend" is not equivalent to "hostility to religion."  Just like teachers in the classroom, coaches are looked up to by athletes.  Gorsuch said that "students were not required nor expected to participate [in the prayer]," which is disingenuous to say the very least.  Show me one high school athlete who, at a practice or a game, would be willing to say to a well-respected coach, "I'm not going to participate in this prayer, I'll just stand here to the side and let everyone watching stare at me.  Tell me when you're done."

But it also brings up the question of why having the coach lead a prayer is a good thing.  Despite Christian alarmists screeching about God not being allowed in schools, no one stops students from praying privately.  I knew a young man who always quietly recited the Grace Before Meals prayer before eating lunch, and I never saw anyone bat an eyelash.  (And I bet there are lots of prayers wafting aloft right before final exams.)  If students want to pray, they certainly can do so.  Why does a coach or a teacher need to cross that line into leading a prayer?

It also brings to mind a particularly inconvenient quote from Jesus himself, in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter six: "And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men.  I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.  But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen."

And as an aside, I wonder what the Supreme Court vote would have been if the coach had led the players in a prayer to Allah and asked them to bow toward Mecca.  Or any of the other hundreds of religious expressions of faith that are out there in the world.

What's most infuriating about this is the same basic thing I was arguing with Steve about; saying "doing this is inappropriate" doesn't mean "I'm anti (whatever the topic is)."  I am not anti-Christian; I have lots of Christian friends and mostly we get along just fine.  The frustration I have is with the subset of Christians who equate the secular society's insistence that Christianity not drive public policy with a desire to destroy Christianity itself.

I have no problem with someone saying "my faith requires me to do this."  I have a big problem with someone saying "my faith requires you to do this."  And that includes situations where the coercion is implicit, such as what school personnel say to young people.  Monday's decision should be deeply troubling to the religious and non-religious alike.  But given the current makeup of the court, I'm worried that we're only seeing the beginnings of an attempt to reestablish the hegemony of Christianity over the lives of all American citizens, irrespective of their own beliefs or lack thereof.

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Pew-pew-pew

Because it's always a losing bet to say the state of things in the United States couldn't get any weirder, today we have: a priest holding a mass of exorcism to protect Brett Kavanaugh from a spell cast by witches.

I wish I were making this up.  You might have heard about the witches, who were so pissed off about Brett Kavanaugh's nomination and ultimate accession to the Supreme Court that they hexed him.  Twice.  Once before the confirmation vote, and once, for good measure, afterwards.

The event, sponsored by spiritualist/occult book store Catland Books, explained it thus:

We will be embracing witchcraft's true roots as the magik of the poor, the downtrodden and disenfranchised and [its] history as often the only weapon, the only means of exacting justice available to those of us who have been wronged by men just like him. 

[Kavanaugh] will be the focal point, but by no means the only target, so bring your rage and all of the axes you've got to grind.  There will also be a second ritual afterward — "The Rites of the Scorned One" which seeks [sic] to validate, affirm, uphold and support those of us who have been wronged and who refuse to be silent any longer.

Well, far be it from the Righteous to take this lying down.  So Father Gary Thomas, who serves as an exorcist for the Diocese of San Jose, California, decided to take some serious action.  "Conjuring up personified evil does not fall under free speech," Thomas said, making me wonder what laws it would fall under.

Spinello Aretino, The Exorcism of St. Benedict (1387) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Although given the current administration's reputation for doing whatever the evangelicals want, I wouldn't be surprised if the next bill to go through Congress is a Satanic Attack Protection Act.  Or perhaps a law preventing demons from immigrating into the United States.  Or maybe just a suggestion to build a wall along the border between the U.S. and hell.

Thomas went on to explain further:

They are going to direct the evil to have a permanently adverse effect on the Supreme Court justice.

When curses are directed at people in a state of grace, they have little or no effect. Otherwise, [I have] witnessed harm come upon people such as physical illness, psychosis, depression and having demons attach to them. Curses sometimes involve a blood sacrifice either through an animal or a human being, such as an aborted baby...

The decision to do this against a Supreme Court justice is a heinous act and says a lot about the character of these people that should not be underestimated or dismissed. These are real evil people.

I suppose this is to be expected from someone in my position, but to me this really sounds like two kids fighting with finger guns, one saying, "Pew-pew-pew!  I got you!  You're dead!" and the other saying, "No, I'm not, I got my magic invisible shield up in time!"

Only these are adults, and I have the sneaking suspicion that a significant proportion of Americans think this is perfectly normal behavior.  And these people vote.

So that's today's contribution from the Department of Surreal News.  I keep thinking that we have to have plumbed the depths of government-endorsed insanity, but I keep being wrong.  A friend of mine thinks that all this is happening because we're living in a computer simulation, and the programmers have gotten bored and now are simply fucking with us to see what we'll do.

And I have to admit, it makes as much sense as any explanation I could have come up with.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is something everyone should read.  Jonathan Haidt is an ethicist who has been studying the connections between morality and politics for twenty-five years, and whose contribution to our understanding of our own motives is second to none.  In The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics, he looks at what motivates liberals and conservatives -- and how good, moral people can look at the same issues and come to opposite conclusions.

His extraordinarily deft touch for asking us to reconsider our own ethical foundations, without either being overtly partisan or accepting truly immoral stances and behaviors, is a needed breath of fresh air in these fractious times.  He is somehow able to walk that line of evaluating our own behavior clearly and dispassionately, and holding a mirror up to some of our most deep-seated drives.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The long game

A lot of people I know are devastated by this weekend's swearing-in of Brett Kavanaugh to a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court.

Let me say up front that the outrage I'm seeing has very little to do with political stance.  I have friends who are Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and Libertarians who all seem equally appalled.  If you doubt that -- if you think this is some kind of butthurt response from liberals -- allow me to do a reality check for you that there was no such outcry from liberals over Neil Gorsuch's appointment.  Sure, liberals don't much like his views, and weren't happy that he was going to tilt the Court to the right.  There was a hell of a lot of anger over the fact that Mitch McConnell and others contrived to prevent Merrick Garland from getting a fair hearing.

But Gorsuch himself?  Whatever you think of his opinions, there's not much doubt that his credentials are excellent and his background squeaky-clean.

Kavanaugh, on the other hand.  Here we have not just one but three credible allegations against him of sexual abuse, multiple instances where it is claimed that he lied under oath about his past, and the withdrawal of support by the American Bar Association and the National Council of Churches.  What was the response?  A cursory look at the situation by the FBI in which investigators didn't even interview the people central to the claim, including Julie Swetnick (Kavanaugh's third accuser) and several friends of Deborah Ramirez (the second accuser) who said they would corroborate Ramirez's claim under oath.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

The worst part is that the Republicans have known that Kavanaugh was a sketchy candidate from the start.  They prevented access to most of his records as White House Staff Secretary, his contributions to the Starr Report (which recommended the impeachment of Bill Clinton), and his work in the 2000 recount that gave the presidency to George W. Bush, papers that had direct bearing on his opinions and legal qualifications.  It's never been about giving the man a fair hearing, where the decision makers have all of the information they need to make a thorough evaluation.  It's been about getting Kavanaugh through the process as fast as possible.  Any attempts to slow things down were labeled as "Democratic obstructionism" and the person making them was steamrolled.

So Mitch McConnell, Lindsay Graham, and Chuck Grassley rammed the nomination through because they could.  I have to admit there's a piece of this I still don't understand; why they didn't cut their losses with Kavanaugh when it was obvious he was a deeply flawed choice, and find someone (like Gorsuch) with strong conservative views and an unimpeachable background?

But that's minor at this point.  What is certain is that McConnell et al., with the approval of Sexual-Abuser-in-Chief Donald Trump, pushed this appointment through, and people like mealy-mouthed, spineless Jeff Flake (who excels at looking sad and telling everyone how troubled he is over the situation, then voting the party line every fucking time) let it happen.

And look at Susan Collins.  She's the one that's generated the most anger.  "I do believe that [Dr. Ford] was assaulted," she said, after Kavanaugh was sworn in.  "I don't know by whom.  I'm not certain when."

Well, Senator Collins, then how about we do a thorough investigation, not just the five-day farce that happened last week?  How about we give a careful look at the other accusers' claims?  Maybe he'd get cleared, I dunno.  Maybe at least it'd be found that there wasn't enough concrete evidence to decide one way or another. But as it stands, we have three women who at great cost to their personal lives have come forward and made themselves the target of right-wing rage, and accomplished exactly nothing.  Hell, Christine Blasey Ford was publicly ridiculed by the president of the United States.

Is it any wonder that victims of sexual abuse are reluctant to come forward?

I have several friends who are survivors of abuse, and I can't begin to imagine what they're feeling right now.  They seem to be in shock that the people they elected to represent them have shown such callous disregard for the trauma they've been through.  Myself, I'm trying not to give up completely.  There has been so much in the last two years that seems to be a slow slide into autocracy, where dissent is labeled as treason, where any media that is not following a North-Korea-style state-sponsored party-line-über-alles style is disregarded as fake news.  I've been writing about this since Trump was first seeking the nomination, as have many others with far more reach than I have, and all of it has availed us nothing at all.

But it seems to me that the only thing giving up accomplishes is that we'll have more of the same.  A wise friend of mine said, "Use alchemy.  Take your despair, disillusionment, and frustration, and distill it into anger."  She's exactly right.  We can't allow the likes of McConnell, Grassley, and Graham, alternately raging when they're challenged and smirking when they're not, to win the day.  Yes, we lost this battle.  But we've got to play the long game, here.

I will end with a quote from one of my heroes, the incomparable Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai, winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her work in reforming environmental policy and supporting women's rights in her home country.  "The only way to accomplish anything is to keep your feelings of being empowered ahead of your feelings of discouragement and inertia.  There is no one solution for everything, but there are many solutions to many of the problems we face.  There is no excuse for inaction."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is from the brilliant essayist and polymath John McPhee, frequent contributor to the New Yorker.  I swear, he can make anything interesting; he did a book on citrus growers in Florida that's absolutely fascinating.  But even by his standards, his book The Control of Nature is fantastic.  He looks at times that humans have attempted to hold back the forces of nature -- the attempts to keep the Mississippi River from changing its path to what is now the Atchafalaya River, efforts in California to stop wildfires and mudslides, and a crazy -- and ultimately successful -- plan to save a harbor in Iceland from a volcanic eruption using ice-cold seawater to freeze the lava.

Anyone who has interest in the natural world should read this book -- but it's not just about the events themselves, it's about the people who participated in them.  McPhee is phenomenal at presenting the human side of his investigations, and their stories will stick with you a long time after you close the last page.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Legally haunted

Have you ever heard of the New York Supreme Court Case, Stambovsky v. Ackley?

I hadn't, until yesterday.

This came up because of a link someone sent me to an article called "There’s A House That’s So Terrifying It Was Legally Declared Haunted By New York State."  And my question, of course, was "what does it mean to be 'legally haunted'?"  If a ghost shows up in a house that is not legally declared to be haunted, do you have the right to call the police and have it arrested?  If so, how could you send a ghost to jail, when according to most people, ghosts can pass through walls, not to mention steel bars?

Be that as it may, the story centered around a house owned by a family named Ackley in Nyack, New York, a town on the Hudson River.  Soon after the Ackleys moved in, they began to have odd experiences, the most alarming of which is that family members reported waking up having their beds violently shaken by an invisible entity.  According to the article, they "learned to live with the spirits," which became easier when one of them apparently figured out that all they had to do to stop the sudden awakenings was to ask the ghosts not to shake their beds during the night.

Which I thought was pretty doggone amenable of the spirits, until I read the next part, wherein a young guest showed up to visit the Ackleys and died immediately of a brain aneurysm [emphasis theirs].  So that's not very nice.  There were also footsteps, slamming doors, and "gifts for the children [left] randomly through the house."  So you can see that with gifts on one end of the spectrum and brain aneurysms on the other, the haunting turned out to be quite a mixed bag.

The Ackley House, courtesy of Google Maps

Anyhow, all of this is your ordinary, garden-variety haunted house story until the Ackleys had enough and decided to sell the house.  The buyers, a family named Stambovsky, purchased it, but it turned out that the Ackleys didn't mention the fact that it was haunted by brain-aneurysm-inducing ghosts.  When they found out the house's reputation, the Stambovskys objected, understandably enough, and sued.  The case went all the way to the New York Supreme Court, where the judge sided with the Stambovskys.  The ruling said:

Where, as here, the seller not only takes unfair advantage of the buyer's ignorance but has created and perpetuated a condition about which he is unlikely to even inquire, enforcement of the contract (in whole or in part) is offensive to the court's sense of equity.  Application of the remedy of rescission, within the bounds of the narrow exception to the doctrine of caveat emptor set forth herein, is entirely appropriate to relieve the unwitting purchaser from the consequences of a most unnatural bargain...  Seller who had undertaken to inform the public at large about the existence of poltergeists on the premises to be sold was estopped to deny existence of poltergeists on the premises, so the house was haunted as a matter of law and seller must inform the purchaser of the haunting.

I wondered about how exactly a purchaser could demonstrate that a house was, in fact, haunted.  After all, that's usually what most failure-to-disclose lawsuits usually turn on; you find that the house you just bought has a leaky roof, and show that the previous owners knew about the leaky roof -- but along the way it's incumbent upon you to demonstrate that the roof does, in fact, leak.  How are you going to do that with a ghost?

But upon reading the ruling more carefully, apparently the decision was based upon the fact that the Ackleys themselves had made public the fact that they thought the house was haunted.  So I guess it's their fault for bragging about their ghosts and then deciding not to tell the purchasers before the contract was signed.

You have to wonder, though, if this might be something that should appear on disclosure statements under "Known Pre-existing Conditions," along with leaks, dry rot, damaged windows, broken appliances, and faulty septic systems.  "Ghosts/poltergeists present" -- yes/no/unknown.  "Ghosts that result in death by aneurysm" -- yes/no/unknown.

The article ends by giving us the address of the house in Nyack, but asking us not to go there. "Respect the current owner’s privacy by admiring it only from your screen," they tell us.  Which does bring up the interesting point of who bought the house after the Supreme Court allowed the Stambovskys to back out of the purchase, and whether the new owners have had any weird experiences or untimely deaths.  The article on the legal case (linked above) said that in 2015 the house sold for $1.77 million -- which was, they said, $600,000 higher than comparable houses in Nyack.

So maybe the Stambovskys should have stuck with it, ghosts and all.  Apparently disembodied spirits of the dead do nothing to diminish home value.  I know I'd happily sell my house for a cool $1.77 million.  I'd even sign a disclosure agreement admitting that it's haunted, and I don't even believe in ghosts.

Justice denied

Because we clearly needed something to make American politics even weirder and more contentious, five days ago Antonin Scalia decided to die suddenly on the day of a Republican presidential debate.

Of course, it wasn't only the candidates who responded with pithy, and at times completely inexplicable, commentary on the legacy of Justice Scalia and the future of the Supreme Court.  But Ted Cruz was certainly one of the first, wasting no time in urging his colleagues in the Senate to block any nominee President Obama brings forward to replace Scalia.  This move set off shrill commentary from both sides of the political spectrum, often from people who apparently consider themselves constitutional law scholars even though they have never read anything longer than the message inside a fortune cookie, and all of which ended up bouncing around on Facebook and Twitter for days.

Then things got crazier still.  Despite the fact that Scalia was 79, overweight, had high blood pressure and a history of heart problems, and had recently been told that he was too weak to undergo rotator cuff surgery, many people decided that there was no way a man that healthy could die suddenly of natural causes.  The conspiracy theories began to multiply like mushrooms after a rainstorm, particularly when it was announced that Scalia would not be autopsied given that his doctor was comfortable signing a death certificate citing natural causes without it.

And of course, leading the way was none other than Donald Trump, who claimed that Scalia was smothered in his sleep.

"They say they found a pillow on his face," Trump said, on Michael Savage's radio show Savage Nation, "which is a pretty unusual place to find a pillow."  Because any Black Ops hit man who was trying to murder a public official and make it look like death from natural causes would clearly be so stupid that he would leave the murder weapon sitting right on the victim's face.

John Poindexter, owner of the Cibolo Creek Ranch in Shafter, Texas, where Scalia died, tried to clarify.  "I think enough disclosures were made and what I said precisely was accurate.  He had a pillow over his head, not over his face as some have been saying.  The pillow was against the headboard and over his head when he was discovered.  He looked like someone who had had a restful night's sleep.  There was no evidence of anything else."

Of course, that only made things look more suspicious.  Alex Jones had an "emergency transmission" on his Facebook site, asking whether Scalia was murdered, but apparently not knowing enough about the situation to realize that the Justice's first name was "Antonin," not "Anthony."  Despite this, he said that Scalia wasn't going to be the last murder of a prominent conservative, and suggested that Texas Governor Greg Abbott might be next:

Scalia walked into the perfect bear trap...  Maybe they’ll find the governor with a pillow over his face, maybe that’s the new thing.  All of these conservatives that are fighting back that are real conservatives, they are all being found with pillows over their faces...  This is it.  This is the final assault.  This is the beginning of the final war.

Then, because apparently Alex Jones was lonely being the only clinically insane person commenting on the situation, we had this:

Can I get some agreement here, from both my conservative and liberal readers, that Michele Bachmann really needs to get back on her meds?

But if you think that's as weird as it gets, you really don't get how deeply crazy some Americans are.  Extremely evangelical pastor Rick Wiles decided to weigh in, and he said that Scalia was clearly murdered by President Obama, possibly with his bare hands.  How did he reach this conclusion?

Numerology, of course.

The 13th was the 44th day of 2016.  Obama is the 44th president of the United States, so you have this numerology thing taking place. 

The man who killed Justice Scalia deliberately left the pillow on his face as a message to everybody else: 'Don’t mess with us, we can murder a justice and get away with it...'  Officials in Washington are all terrified.  Deep down they know, the regime murdered a justice…  This is the way a dictatorial, fascist, police state regime takes control of a nation.  Barack Obama is the most lawless president we have ever had in the history of this great country, but his lawlessness is a catalyst to wake up the sleeping giant.

But no episode of Insanity On Parade would be complete without a contribution from Glenn Beck, and I'm happy to say that he doesn't disappoint.  Beck lays the death of Justice Scalia at the feet of god himself, and said that god had a purpose in offing Scalia when he did: to incite Americans to vote for Ted Cruz.

On Beck's weekly radio show, his co-host Pat Gray lamented the Justice's untimely death.  "I couldn't help but wonder, why?" Gray said.  "Why now?  Why did you have to take Antonin now?"  And Beck, as always, was ready to address the question with his usual realistic approach.

Pat, I think I have an answer for you on that. 

The lord is saying, I just woke the American people up.  I took them out of the game show moment and woke enough of them up to say, 'Look how close your liberty is to being lost.'  The Constitution is hanging by a thread.  That thread has just been cut.  And the only way that we survive now is if we have a true constitutionalist as president.

Beck was immediately taken to task by Christians who questioned his view that god would knock off someone merely to make a point with the survivors, even though in the bible god does that sort of thing every other page.  But Beck shares with Donald Trump the personal motto, "Death Before Backing Down," and responded thusly:

(P)erhaps God allowed Scalia to die at this time to wake America up to how close we are to the loss of our freedom.  I happen to believe in divine providence.  Americans historically have.  Maybe you do not.  That is your choice and I do not mock you for not.  Why mock me for believing in a traditional view of God? 

Fall to your knees and pray to God to reveal to you what the hour is.  This is your last call, America!  Stand with the man I believe was raised for this hour, Ted Cruz!

So anyway.  I don't think we've nearly seen the last of the wild theories surrounding Scalia's death.  After all, it's over fifty years since Kennedy was killed, and people are still arguing about that one -- and in that case, there was no doubt that it was a murder.  The whole thing makes me vaguely embarrassed to admit that I'm an American when I go overseas, you know?  Not that I'm not proud of my country or unpatriotic or any of that sort of thing, but because we do seem to have way more than our fair share of extremely loud lunatics.  I'd rather not have to spend my time convincing the people I meet while traveling that no, I don't support Donald Trump, that yes, I do think the world is more than 6,000 years old, and that no, I have no idea why the Kardashians are still in the news.  And the fact that we apparently can't accept that a 79 year old man with a weak heart couldn't die of natural causes in his sleep without some kind of evil conspiracy being involved makes me want to polish up my Norwegian so I can claim I'm only visiting the United States on a work visa.

Moral assault

There is a speech by a public figure that I wonder if you've heard.

I won't present it here in full; but I will give a link to the complete text later, for those of you interested in reading the entire thing.  But here is a bit of it:

There is an effort today to disturb the established order.  Wait a minute.  Listen, I am talking straight to you....  Let me repeat, the Bible says as clearly as language can put it...   

Individually, Christian people... through the years have been able to work together and to understand each other.  But now a world of outside agitation has been started, and people are coming in the name of piety, but it is a false piety, and are endeavoring to disturb God’s established order; and we are having turmoil all over America.  This disturbing movement is not of God.  It is not in line with the Bible.  It is Satanic.  Now, listen and understand this.  Do not let people lead you astray.

These religious liberals are the worst infidels in many ways in the country; and some of them are filling pulpits...  They do not believe the Bible any longer; so it does not do any good to quote it to them.  They have gone over to modernism, and they are leading... people astray at the same time... But every good, substantial, Bible-believing, intelligent, orthodox Christian can read the Word of God and know that what is happening now is not of God...

Whenever you get a situation that rubs out the line that God has drawn... whenever that happens, you are going to have trouble.  That is what is happening today in this country.  All this agitation is... to overthrow the established order of God in this world...  Certain people are disturbing this situation.  They talk about the fact that we are going to have one world.  We will never really have one world until this world heads up in God.  We are not going to have one world by man’s rubbing out the line that God has established.  He is marking the lines, and you cannot rub them out and get away with it.

The established order cannot be overthrown without having trouble.  That is what wrecked Paradise.  God set up the order of Paradise.  He told Adam and Eve how to live and what food to eat and what not to eat.  He drew the lines around that Garden; and when Adam and Eve crossed over the lines of God, thorns grew on roses.  The first baby that was born was a murderer and killed his own brother.  So it has gone down through the ages.  It is man’s rebellion (due to the fall) against a Holy God to overthrow the established order of God in this world.

Sound like familiar rhetoric?  Contains a few more words, but basically the same sentiment as Rowan County Clerk Kim Davis's statement on being released from jail the day before yesterday: "I just want to give God the glory.  We serve a living God who knows exactly where each and everyone stands.  Keep pressing, don’t let down because he is here.  He is worthy."

And no one was more voluble about the jailing of Davis being an assault on the established order of god in the world than Mike Huckabee.  In an op-ed piece he wrote for Fox News, Huckabee said:

When I warned that the Supreme Court’s decision on marriage would lead to the criminalization of Christianity in America I was dismissed by many as an alarmist and my comments were mocked by the chattering class.  Now, just two months after the court's lawless ruling, an elected county clerk has been put in jail by an unelected judge for refusing to issue a “marriage" license to a same-sex couple, removing all doubts about criminalization of Christianity in this country. 

Kim's stand for religious liberty is a pivotal moment in our nation's history.  Will we continue to pretend as though the Supreme Court is the "Supreme Branch" with the authority and ability to make laws?  It most certainly is not.  The Supreme Court is one of three co-equal branches of government under our Constitution.  It is no more the "Supreme Branch" than it is the "Supreme Being" with the authority to redefine the laws of nature or of nature's God!

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see the parallels between Huckabee's words and the opinions voiced in the speech from which I quoted in the beginning of this post.  God has delineated proper guidelines for behavior; the courts are attempting to force the abandonment of those guidelines; and right-thinking Christian folk are commanded to stand up against the tyranny of a judicial system determined to erase the divine order in the United States of America.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The only problem is, the first speech is one given by evangelical preacher Bob Jones in 1960 after the Supreme Court forced the segregation of public schools in the Brown vs. Board of Education decision.  He argued that the separation of races was a moral imperative, straight from the mouth of god via the bible.  The Supreme Court of the day was nicknamed "the nine dictators" and public employees were encouraged to flout the ruling -- resulting in the "Massive Resistance" movement that shut down schools in Prince Edward County, Virginia for nearly two years rather than see them integrated.

See the problem here?  When someone claims to know what god wants, almost always (what a coincidence!) god's will agrees perfectly with the person's own biases and beliefs.  Cherry-picking scripture to back up those biases and beliefs is easy enough; as we've seen over and over, you can find support for damn near anything you want in the bible if you pick and choose, up to and including stoning disobedient children to death.

And each time some bigoted cultural practice is presented as divine utterance, dire predictions are made of what will happen to our society if it's legislated into well-deserved oblivion.  Just yesterday, Glenn Beck said that the Supreme Court's decision on gay marriage was going to lead to our abandonment by god:

This is it.  I'm telling you this is the last call.  Within a year, America will be so divided that we literally will not even be able to understand one another.  I am telling you, please, Dear God, listen to me, please.  Please!  We are here.  This is the moment that historians will look back and say, 'They would have survived, but they chose death instead.'  He can no longer be our God.  He has to withdraw...  We're going to feel the full ramifications of what it feels like to choose death.

How is this any different from Bob Jones's claiming that ending segregation was "rebellion... against a Holy God to overthrow the established order of God in this world?"  Both are motivated by the narrow-minded, self-righteous bigotry of men and women who believe that the law of god demands the denial of basic human rights -- and both are justified using scripture and the language of hellfire and damnation.

And both, fortunately, are destined to the scrap-heap of history, along with countless other evils that have been put into the mouth of god by pious hypocrites -- slavery, the subjugation of women, anti-semitism, the torture of heretics, the burning of witches.

The target changes each time.

The basic inhumanity of moral assault, however, always remains the same, regardless of how it's justified.

Sharing the misery

I guess it was too much to hope for that the opponents of marriage equality would say, "Oh.  I guess it's the law of the land now, and we lost.   Bummer."  And disappear gracefully.

Things are never that easy, are they?  The dire threats of what's gonna happen to us, now that we've allowed LGBT people to have the same rights that the rest of us have always had and completely take for granted, are already ringing from the rafters.

First we had the ever-grim Franklin Graham, informing us that now that the Supreme Court has legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, there's gonna be hell to pay:

I’m disappointed because the government is recognizing sin.  This court is endorsing sin.  That’s what homosexuality is – a sin against god...  Arrogantly disregarding God’s authority always has serious consequences.  Our nation will not like what’s at the end of this rainbow...  The President had the White House lit up in rainbow colors to celebrate the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage.  This is outrageous—a real slap in the face to the millions of Americans who do not support same-sex marriage and whose voice is being ignored.

Graham wasn't the only one who keyed in on the whole rainbow thing.  Over at Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham took a moment away from building a new Ark to make the following cheery assessment:

The president did not invent the rainbow; God invented it, and He put the rainbow in the sky as a special reminder related to Noah’s Flood.  God had sent the global Flood in Noah’s time as a judgment because of man’s wickedness in rebelling against the Creator...  (T)he rainbow was set up by God as a sign to remind us that there will never again be a global Flood as a judgment.  But one day there will be another global judgment—the final judgment—and it will be by fire...  (W)e need to take back the rainbow and worship the One who invented the rainbow, and every time we see it be reminded of its true message.

Which brings up a point I've never understood.  How does the whole Flood thing lead anyone to think that Yahweh of the Old Testament is worthy of worship?  It's more the action of a genocidal maniac, in my opinion -- killing everyone and everything, infants and children included, because of some perceived wickedness that couldn't be fixed any other way.

Oh, but rainbows!  There are rainbows, so it's all okay!

Isn't this a little like saying, "Hey, dude!  I know I drowned your family and pets and livestock and all, but look, here's a pretty rainbow in the sky as my promise I won't do it again!"  *glowers*  "At least not that way.  I might still start a fire and burn them all alive.  But if you bow down and worship me exactly the right way, I might let you slide, this time."

Doesn't that make you want to shout hallelujah at god's infinite goodness?

But no one demonstrated quite so clearly the truth of the old definition of Puritanism as "the desperate fear that somewhere, people are enjoying themselves" as Wayne Allyn Root.  Root, you may recall, is the one who said that the only way that Obamacare was upheld by the Supreme Court is that the president blackmailed Justice Roberts.  And now, Root has made a rather bizarre pronouncement -- that same-sex marriage is wrong, because marriage isn't about happiness:

Marriage is the most difficult thing in the world.  I’m talking to you as someone who has been married 24 years, marriage is so difficult that if you do not go to church every Sunday and your whole life isn’t built on a bedrock faith in God and you don’t have kids and your whole life isn’t built around those kids and none of that’s in place and you’re married, the odds of you staying married are close to zero.  Divorces will now triple.  Gays will never stay married.  They just bought themselves the biggest bunch of unhappiness and legal bills that they could ever imagine.

"Go ahead, LGBT people," Root seems to be saying.  "I hope you're satisfied.  Now you get to be just as miserable as the rest of us."

You have to wonder what his wife thought when she read this, don't you?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Besides just being ridiculous, his statement is actually exactly the opposite of the fact.  The highest divorce rates aren't among atheists.  The highest divorce rate of any of the main religious affiliations is the Baptists, at 29%.  (Atheists are at 21%, tying the virulently anti-divorce Catholics.)  Regionally the highly religious Southeast and Midwest have the highest numbers of divorces, with Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, and Oklahoma topping the list.  

Kind of funny, when the bible is even more unequivocal about divorce being sinful than it is about homosexuality.  Consider Luke 16:18: "Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another commits adultery, and whoever marries a woman divorced from her husband commits adultery."  And adultery, recall, was punishable by being stoned to death.

And yet, the ultra-religious aren't pressuring the courts to make divorce illegal.  Funny thing, that.

So anyway, I'm sure we haven't heard the last of this.  We'll be revisiting it frequently, not only when individual clerks of court refuse to issue marriage licenses to LGBT couples (something that has already started) but every time there is a natural disaster, at which point we'll hear all about how it's "god's wrath."

I wonder what god will pick as a symbol this time that he still loves us even though he's willing to smite the shit out of us at the drop of a hat?  After all, he's already used rainbows.  Maybe flowers, you think?  Flowers are nice.  "I'm sorry you deserved being beaten to a pulp," he'll say.  "Here, have a dozen roses.  All better now?"

Love wins

I'm sure that most of you know by now that in a landmark 5-4 decision, the United States Supreme Court made same-sex marriage legal across the nation.

When I got up this morning, I noticed a few things that bear mention.

• The world still exists.
• God did not smite America.  No meteorites, no volcanic eruptions, no earthquakes.  Nothing.
• My marriage to Carol has continued, unaltered, since yesterday.
• Texas pastor Rick Scarborough has yet to set himself on fire.
• The bible-thumpers who threatened to move to Canada are still here.

I find the last-mentioned especially amusing, given that Canada legalized same-sex marriage in 2005.  If you people are looking for a place to move, a country where religion trumps the rule of law, homosexuality is a punishable offense, and everyone is expected to run their lives by the precepts of a holy book, I think Syria or Iraq might fit the bill better than Canada.

What gets me most about all of these people is that they're not just content to live their lives by their own religious precepts; they expect everyone else to follow those precepts, too.  Not satisfied with simply practicing their own religion to the best of their ability, they demand that the entire country has to do so as well.

It's not that hard.  If you want to marry someone of the same gender, do so.  If you don't, then don't.  

End of story.

Or would be, except for the likes of Glenn Beck, who thinks that giving people rights they've been denied amounts to persecuting everyone else.  Beck, who really needs to up the dosage on his anti-psychotic meds, had the following to say:

Persecution is coming. If this goes through, persecution is coming.  I mean serious prosecution.  Mark my words. …  If gay marriage goes through the Supreme Court and gay marriage becomes fine and they can put teeth in it, so now they can go after the churches, 50 percent of our churches will fall away, meaning the congregations.  Within five years, the congregations, 50 percent of the congregants will fall away from their church because they won’t be able to take the persecution.

Further, he says that there are tens of thousands of ministers who are going to face martyrdom because of the decision:

The number in the Black Robe Regiment [a group of conservative Christians Beck likes to talk about] is about 70,000 now.  The number that I think will walk through a wall of fire, you know, and possible death, is anywhere between 17,000 and 10,000.  That is an extraordinary number of people that are willing to lay it all down on the table and willing to go to jail or go to death because they serve God and not man.

Because that's likely.  I think the Black Robe Regiment is going to be pretty frustrated over the next few months, wandering around looking in vain for someone to kill them:

[member of the Black Robe Regiment shows up at a gay couple's wedding reception] 

Black Robe dude:  "Aha!  Here we go!"  (throws his arms open)  "Go ahead!  Oppress me, torture me, and kill me!  I'm ready to die!" 

Guy at wedding reception (puzzled):  "Why would I do that?  This is a celebration.  Here, have some cake." 

Black Robe dude (triumphantly):  "I thought so.  This cake is poisoned, isn't it?" 

Guy at wedding reception:  "No, sorry.  It's lemon cake with rainbow frosting."  (takes a bite)  "See? Delicious."

Black Robe dude:  "So you're not going to murder me for my beliefs?" 

Guy at wedding reception:  "Nope." 

Black Robe dude:  "Rats."  (slinks off, looking for persecution elsewhere)

Beck, of course, wasn't the only one.  Franklin Graham, Billy Graham's less compassionate son, was grim yesterday evening.  "I pray God will spare America from His judgment," Graham said.  "Though, by our actions as a nation, we give Him less and less reason to do so."

Mike Huckabee, of course, was considerably more verbose in his reaction, not to mention considerably less coherent:

The Supreme Court has spoken with a very divided voice on something only the Supreme Being can do-redefine marriage.  I will not acquiesce to an imperial court any more than our Founders acquiesced to an imperial British monarch. We must resist and reject judicial tyranny, not retreat. 

This ruling is not about marriage equality, it's about marriage redefinition.  This irrational, unconstitutional rejection of the expressed will of the people in over 30 states will prove to be one of the court's most disastrous decisions, and they have had many.  The only outcome worse than this flawed, failed decision would be for the President and Congress, two co-equal branches of government, to surrender in the face of this out-of-control act of unconstitutional, judicial tyranny. 

The Supreme Court can no more repeal the laws of nature and nature's God on marriage than it can the law of gravity.  Under our Constitution, the court cannot write a law, even though some cowardly politicians will wave the white flag and accept it without realizing that they are failing their sworn duty to reject abuses from the court.  If accepted by Congress and this President, this decision will be a serious blow to religious liberty, which is the heart of the First Amendment.

Right.  Because that's what the Supreme Court is supposed to be doing; passing "god's law."

But no one was more butthurt than Justice Antonin Scalia, who said in his dissent, "Who ever thought that intimacy and spirituality [whatever that means] were freedoms?" he wrote.  "And if intimacy is, one would think that Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage.  Ask the nearest hippie."

And the result was not what Scalia hoped, which was for people to sit up and amazement and say, "Good heavens, you're right!"  Instead, #AskTheNearestHippie has become a trending hashtag on Twitter, along with a brilliant new Twitter account to follow... @TheNearestHippie.

Because, Justice Scalia, mocking a ridiculous statement is a freedom.  It's called freedom of speech.

But despite all of this, the lion's share of the responses I saw yesterday were positive.  Facebook positively erupted in rainbows.  Even a conservative buddy of mine posted, "Let gays get married.  Let the rednecks have their guns.  Let atheists be atheists, and let Christians be Christians.  Because America is about freedom.  Freedom to live how you please, and be happy with your life.  So smoke a bowl, shoot your guns, cuss a lot, praise Jesus, and wish those two fellas next door a happy honeymoon."

To which I responded, "Amen, brother."

So there you are.  The law of the land.  And to my LGBT friends and their allies who have fought this battle for decades, I can only say:

Congratulations.  Love won.

Swing votes, squirt guns, and prayer

Most of you probably know that the United States Supreme Court is likely to announce a decision on the federal legalization of same-sex marriage some time this month, and that the decision is likely to come down to how one man votes -- Justice Anthony Kennedy, who is in the uncomfortable position of being the "swing voter."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The more liberal-leaning justices -- Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan -- seem likely to vote in favor.  The remaining four more conservative members are likely to vote against.  That means that Kennedy will almost certainly be the one who casts the deciding vote.

And this is why he is currently the target of prayer rallies.

The effort is being organized by "Coach" Dave Daubenmire, who came into the public eye after an ACLU suit to stop him from forcing the players on his high school football team to pray.  Daubenmire and the school district he worked for settled out of court (the school district lost $18,000 in the process), but Daubenmire now spends a lot of time on the lecture circuit telling everyone how he beat the ACLU because of god's power and the power of prayer.

And now Daubenmire, who in his post-coaching days runs a ministry called "Pass the Salt" (further increasing the WTF factor in the whole thing), is organizing a nationwide series of prayer rallies that have as their goal persuading god to persuade Anthony Kennedy to vote no:

We're going to have a solemn assembly of prayer and repentance, asking God, please God, help us rescue marriage.  And we're going to totally focus on Justice Kennedy, we believe he is the swing vote, and we're just going to ask the Lord to forgive us of our sins and turn the heart of Justice Kennedy that he might see the error of his ways and protect marriage. The neat part about it... is that we're asking people from all across America.  Clear out there in California, you can't come to Washington D. C., but could you organize a prayer vigil at the same time we're doing it, noon to three o'clock Eastern Time on June 14?  Could you get the people in your church to come to a prayer rally?  It's not where we're asking the politicians to do something, it's not where we're marching and carrying signs and rebelling, it's where we're saying "Lord, forgive us, how did we ever get in this mess, please, Lord, forgive us."  

Can I paint a picture here, real quickly?  I like to use the illustration of Super Soakers, the little squirt guns that look like big cannons that kids like to play with.  That's they way I see prayer.  Everybody has a Super Soaker.  There a lot of people who are praying, and they're squirting their guns, they're doing all they can, but there's a difference between putting a lot of people out in a field and telling them to shoot away, and bringing them into your living room and putting a dot on the ceiling and saying, "Hey, everybody, point your Super Soaker at the dot on the ceiling."  The end result of that, if we got a hundred people to point their squirt guns at the dot on the ceiling, eventually there'd be a hole in the ceiling.  Concentrated, focused prayer.  That's why we think the Salt and Light Brigade is so important.  They don't have to come, we'd love for people to come, but we realize they can't.  But what if they all gathered in their local churches, or with their prayer groups, or with their families, and we told them who to pray for... We're going to focus all of our power in the same direction rather than just sporadically squirting our guns up in the air.  We're going to focus our guns on the same target, and punch a hole in the heavenlies. 

So far, this all Super Soakers For Jesus business seems to fall into the "No Harm If It Amuses You" department, but I do have to wonder how this could possibly work even if you accept Daubenmire's premise that there is a god who somehow likes to micromanage affairs here on Earth.  Daubenmire and his ilk always go on and on about how god knows everything and is all-good and all-powerful and will ultimately make everything work out; so it seems a little odd that anyone who believes that would think that prayer would accomplish anything.  Either your opinion is in line with what god already intended to do (in which case god was going to do it anyway, and your prayers are unnecessary) or it isn't (in which case god has no intent of doing what you say, so your prayers are futile).  Either way, it doesn't accomplish much.

Even C. S. Lewis, whose writing is usually pretty clear-headed and rational -- not that I agree with most of his conclusions -- seemed troubled by all this.  In his essay "Does Prayer Work?", he is up front that you can't change god's mind, but he thinks that petitionary prayer still somehow makes sense:

Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of men?  For infinite wisdom does not need telling what is best, and infinite goodness needs no urging to do it.  But neither does God need any of those things that are done by finite agents, whether living or inanimate. He could, if He chose, repair our bodies miraculously without food; or give us food without the aid of farmers, bakers, and butchers, or knowledge without the aid of learned men; or convert the heathen without missionaries.  Instead, He allows soils and weather and animals and the muscles, minds, and wills of men to cooperate in the execution of His will.

Which, frankly, strikes me as a little petty.  It's like a parent saying to his child, "I know you're hungry, but I'm not giving you food unless you ask, and you have to ask in exactly the right way."

And it also brings up the problematic situation for Daubenmire if Kennedy votes "yes."  Was god not listening?  Did the devil persuade Kennedy to vote in a more infernal way?  Did the prayers not work for some other reason?  Did they not have enough people praying?  ("You know, if there'd been 1,284,733 people praying, I'd'a had a chat with Justice Kennedy.  But 1,284,732 people just didn't quite do it for me.")

Because if god is so dead-set against same-sex marriage, you'd think he'd find a way to make sure it didn't happen regardless, right?

So the whole thing seems to turn on a philosophical point that doesn't, honestly, make a lot of sense.  It's far from the only thing in this worldview that I can't make sense of, of course.

As I said before, however, there's no real harm in it.  If they want to spend their time trying to change a presumably all-knowing deity's mind, they can knock themselves out.  At least that's less time they'll have to try to convince politicians, who not only can be swayed, but who actually exist.

Let us pray...

In the latest from the Quick Comeuppance department, we have news that only three days after the Supreme Court sided 5-4 with the town of Greece, New York in supporting their right to open town meetings with a prayer, a man in Deerfield Beach, Florida has put in his official request to open a city commission meeting with a prayer...

... to Satan.

My first reaction upon reading this was, and I quote, "BA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA."  Surely the Supreme Court justices must have realized what a can of worms they were opening.  Whatever your opinion about whether the United States was a Christian nation at its founding, it's pretty certain that it's not any more -- or at least, Christianity isn't the unified front it once was.  Unbelievers now account for one out of every five Americans, and then there are all of the minority religions, not to mention the fact that Christianity itself has shattered into hundreds of little sects that barely agree with each other on anything but the basics, and sometimes not even that.  So it comes down to the fact that separation of church and state protects everyone; it protects me from being forced to sit through a prayer I don't believe in, and it protects Christians from having to sit through a prayer praising Lucifer.

Which, of course, is the point that Chaz Stevens is trying to make with his letter to the City of Deerfield Beach, which reads as follows:

Dear City of Deerfield Beach: 

With the recent US Supreme Court ruling allowing “prayer before Commission meetings” and seeking the rights granted to others, I hereby am requesting I be allowed to open a Commission meeting praying for my God, my divine spirit, my Dude in Charge. 

Be advised, I am a Satanist. 

Let me know when this is good for you. 

Besties 

Chaz Stevens, Calling in from Ring 6 of Dante’s Inferno

Stevens is the same guy who responded to Florida Governor Rick Scott's support of a city-sponsored nativity scene with a demand to place next to it an eight-foot-tall Festivus pole made of Pabst Blue Ribbon cans.

And won.

Then, there is the group who is constructing a ten-foot-tall statue of Baphomet to be placed at the Oklahoma Statehouse -- after State Representative Mike Ritze pushed through a request by a conservative Christian group to erect a monument of the Ten Commandments.  The legislators aren't going to take that lying down, to judge by Representative Earl Sears's response upon hearing of the plans for the statue: "This is a faith-based nation and a faith-based state.   I think it is very offensive they would contemplate or even have this kind of conversation."

So breaking down the wall between church and state is apparently just fine, as long as it's the right church.

Kind of gives new meaning to the phrase, "Be Careful What You Wish For," doesn't it?

What gets me about all of this stuff, though, is the one question you so seldom hear anyone ask: why do people want to have a mandated prayer before a government meeting?  Or, for that matter, a government-funded nativity scene?  No one is saying you can't pray privately all you want, whenever and wherever you want, or have a nativity scene in your own personal yard so garish that the lights blind the drivers of nearby cars.  But what earthly purpose can there be to have such religious gestures carry the government's imprimatur?

Except, of course, to rub it in the faces of people who don't believe.  That, I think, is the tacit goal here -- to say to us atheists (and, probably, to adherents to other religions as well), "Ha ha.  The United States is too a Christian nation.  See?  We showed you, didn't we?"

The teensy problem with this, though, is that by so doing, the Christians who are making such an issue of this aren't even following the precepts of their own holy book.  I turn your attention to Matthew 6:5-6, wherein we read, "And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.  Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.  But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."

Mmm-hmm.  Wonder what Justice Kennedy, who wrote the majority decision, would say in response to that?  Not much, is my guess.  Because take a look what he actually did write: "To hold that invocations must be nonsectarian would force the legislatures that sponsor prayers and the courts that are asked to decide these cases to act as supervisors and censors of religious speech, a rule that would involve government in religious matters to a far greater degree than is the case under the town’s current practice of neither editing or approving prayers in advance nor criticizing their content after the fact."

Righty-o.  Well done.  I will be looking forward to hearing how the City Commission of Deerfield Beach likes starting their meetings with a prayer to Satan.  And to anyone who feels so inclined, I would be happy to help you write a nice invocation of the Flying Spaghetti Monster to use at whatever public meeting you'd like.